Duchamp Sourcefinder closing

Anything "BOINC" specific can be commented on here...such as Project news and announcements etc. Also: any problems with BOINC or maybe you have found something interesting, tell us about it. Chat about the various 3rd party client applications used for some of the projects such as optimised clients.
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Woodles
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Duchamp Sourcefinder closing

Post by Woodles »

https://sourcefinder.theskynet.org/duch ... php?id=279
So some bad news today. Kevin was recently talking with a few of the higher ups at ICRAR, and it's been decided that Sourcefinder is to be shut down along with POGS.
I won't be adding any additional workunits to the queue. I plan on leaving the current 700 or so workunits to finish processing before I look into collecting and archiving the data and shutting the Sourcefinder server down.
No more tasks to send, ~500 in progress then that's your lot.

Another project bites the dust :(

Mark
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Re: Duchamp Sourcefinder closing

Post by UBT - Timbo »

Hi Mark

That's a shame...but OTOH, it might mean that the projects that continue to be active might attact more members crunching for them.

The obvious downside is that the data gathered by projects will end and hence whatever research it is they are/were carrying out, will end.

However, some previous projects didn't seem like they were doing much for "science"....anyone remember Belgian Beer? Chess960? Or NQueens?

EDIT: I've just seen this on BOINC Manager Notices:
I should also mention that within ICRAR there's a pretty heavy shift away from distributed computing methods such as BOINC, toward simply utilising the increasing processing power of supercomputers.
We all know of the issues with BOINC and the requirements of each project to keep it running with updated applications, and the forum/support infrastructure to keep members "happy". Plus there's also the issue of getting enough people actually crunching your data.

So, this also suggests that BOINC may not actually have a long shelf life, esp if "scientists" are moving towards using Google/Amazon "cloud" based services...which clearly requires less "oveheads" and "workloads" (from a man power point of view) compared to BOINC and of course they can crunch as much or as little data as they need, depending on their actual daily/weekly requirements, rather than waiting until BOINC members have actually returned enough data.

regards
Tim
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